Love in the Vineyard (Tavonesi #7)(18)

Impulsive.

The social worker’s word from years ago rang in her head. She’d worked hard since those days to tame her impulses.

“So many vineyards,” she said, still fighting the impulse to ask him to take her back to the café.

She sounded like an escapee from a mental institution. Except such places didn’t exist anymore. People with mental challenges ended up in homeless shelters—if they were lucky. That was another reason she was determined to save money from her new job and get her own place for her and Tyler—to open up a spot for a woman who had no alternative. A spot for a woman who hadn’t landed in a shelter because she’d made a stupid bet.

Adrian looked over at her. “You don’t like vineyards?”

She snapped back to the present, to the car, to the man.

“No, I do.”

Did she? She hadn’t spent any time in a vineyard. The orientation tour at Casa del Sole was the first time she’d set foot in a vineyard. She might not be revealing specifics about her life, but she didn’t want to lie to him.

“Honestly, I haven’t spent much time around them. Vineyards, I mean. I have more experience with flowers and vegetables.”

“Then you’re way ahead of me. I couldn’t grow a vegetable if my life depended on it. But I do love flowers. Flowers were my mother’s great love.”

Were. She heard the past tense, heard the hitch in his voice. Knew that his mother hadn’t just given up growing flowers. Knew that she was dead. Oh yes, she knew the sound of her own voice when she spoke about her mother.

“I’m sorry.” She meant it.

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the road. “I thought that after a year had passed, I’d be through it, the grieving. But it’s been more than a year and it turns out none of us are.”

“It gets better,” she said, resisting the urge to pat Adrian’s arm. She didn’t want to tell him that it took years. Decades. That the missing never went away.

Us. He had sisters; he’d said so. Eight. A huge family. He couldn’t know he’d poked a sore spot. She wanted Tyler to have a family—a family that navigated the ups and downs of life together. A family that could protect him in case anything happened to her. But so far, she hadn’t managed to take even one step in that direction.

Taking that step would involve marrying. Maybe having another child. She should’ve looked for a suitable man years earlier, but she hadn’t been ready. And wasn’t ready now. Maybe she never would be.

She knew all men weren’t like Eddie, but even after years of trying she couldn’t erase what her body knew, what her body feared. Head knowledge had an uphill battle to trump fear.

Guilt knotted in her chest, making it hard to breathe. She pressed a button and lowered the window, letting in cool, fresh air.

If she could get past her fears and buck up, maybe she could create a more secure future for Tyler. She hated that doing so might require a man. A man with means. A kind man, a reliable man, a man with an extended family that wasn’t crazy and would welcome her son. But she didn’t trust fate and sure didn’t trust her own powers of discernment.

For a few miles neither of them spoke. The silence was more uncomfortable than talking had been. She fought her thoughts and searched for something, anything, to say. But the words wouldn’t come.

“Here we are.” Adrian turned the car off the main road onto a gravel drive. “There aren’t any docent tours today, so you’re stuck with me. And the brochures.”

Brochures.

If she was careful, he wouldn’t notice she couldn’t read them. At least not quickly. And the way her nerves were jittering? She probably wouldn’t be able to read at all.

She leaped out of the car, not wanting to give him a chance to come around, to open the door, to take her hand. Touching him was a bad idea. Touching him made her thoughts scramble and her desires rev up.

He dropped five dollars into the plastic box beside the arched fence marking the entrance to the gardens and took a guidebook from the covered rack beside it. He handed the booklet to her.

She handed it back. “I forgot my glasses.” Sometimes lies were necessary. And they didn’t count when no one got hurt. It couldn’t hurt to have him read to her.

“You wore contacts the night of the ball?”

She hadn’t expected him to question her. “I only need them for reading,” she said quickly. “I hadn’t imagined I’d be reading out here. Besides, I find that plants speak for themselves. I rather like looking at them just as they are, without maps and descriptions.”

They started up a gravel path that wound through a glade of flowering shrubs and plants. They walked side by side, and she was careful not to brush up against him.

“My sister Amber tells me that plants speak a language all their own,” he said. “She’s done years of research. I don’t remember the science precisely, but she discovered that when insects chew leaves, plants respond by releasing volatile organic compounds into the air, communicating to other plants around them and signaling that they should pump out insect-repelling chemicals to ward off attack.”

He shot her another of his bone-melting grins. “Other researchers have duplicated her studies, so she’s no longer considered one of the lunatic fringe, much to our father’s relief. For a while, he thought she was losing it. But I never did. I’m sure there are languages and ways of communicating that have nothing to do with words.”